Hokay, lemme figure out my specs.

It's a Compaq Presario 7000 series, number is 7AP140, it's had some modifications from stock.
I've got an ATI Radeon 7000 series 64mb card installed, driver version 6.2 I believe? Latest I could find for 98.
I have an AMD Athlon of some kind with 800mhz.
512 MBs of RAM
Sound Blaster PCI 128 is my sound.
I also installed the unofficial 98SE SP3, mostly just the core stuff and DirectX 9.0c I believe. I did this after D2 already didn't work, though.

ANYWAY, here's my problem(s)

I install Diablo 2 from the discs, put in key, yadda yadda. Install goes fine. Recommends Direct3D, so I say sure why not. Reboot. Game won't run. Try to install patch, this happens:
"Blizzard PrePatch v2.70 compiled on Sep 9 2003
This program patches Diablo II

Log created at 5:52 pm on 06/05/2020

Registry error saving key 'Patch\Patches'
The configuration registry database is corrupt.

RESULT: Prepatch failed"

That's on every patch version I've tried, including after installing LOD and trying LOD patches. Every patch the same.

When I try to boot D2 vanilla, no patches, nothing, it doesn't load. Just nothing. When I try to boot LOD without any patches, I get the opening cinematics, it gets to the D2 loading screen, and then it hangs. Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing. Hard power off necessary to get back to things.

SO I hope this is enough information, can anyone tell me why in the world D2/LOD won't run on my more than capable Windows 98 machine? I would really appreciate it. Thanks!

PS I tried installing the download version on my modern(ish) PC and copying the files over, same junk, no go.

EDIT: Should note I added my DxDiag just for fun, also that I originally installed it in D:\Diablo II, then I tried again in C:\Program Files\Diablo II, same result.